Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at two colleges in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly examines why it can be considered artistically appropriate that T., who is hardly given individual characteristics in the poem, is referred to in the title at all.

"Two Poems for T." is one of Cesare Pavese's later works, scribbled in a notebook in 1946 and unpublished until after his suicide in 1950. The poem could hardly be more cryptic, from the fact that this one poem is identified as two, to the references to specific objects (such as "goats") that seem to identify a particular, unidentified setting, to the fact that the "you" of the poem is identified less by social relationship than by philosophical situation. There is so much left unsaid in this poem that critics tend to look outside its lines, to the life of the poet himself, when trying...